"Good morning there, Mr. Cowboy," Altman greets him. "How are you? Listen, I've got a scene coming up here with you where you don't have any words to remember."
"My favorite kind," Reilly replies cheerily.
Actors have always wanted to work for Robert Altman, and so it is on this set. Maya Rudolph, the "Saturday Night Live" stalwart who plays an assistant stage manager in this film, speaks admiringly of Altman's ability to capture the "natural disarray" in human interaction. Reilly calls it "controlled chaos."
For the chance to be in his films, which are always commercially iffy, actors leave money on the table. Madsen, who is coming off an Oscar nomination for "Sideways" and is fielding the most lucrative offers of her career, says, "Everybody's doing it for scale."
Keillor says he and his collaborator are "entirely unlike," and in many respects that's true. For much of his career, Altman was a dedicated carouser; Patrick McGilligan, the author of a 1989 biography, describes the director in the late 1940s as having "a tireless personality and a loose zipper." The Minnesotan is a solitary fellow who says, "My idea of the way to spend your life was to sit at your dining-room table and write."
But the writer and the director are both midwesterners. On a tree-shaded, well-kept block in the pleasant Brookside neighborhood of Kansas City still stands the bungalow where Altman spent his first few years. (Erica Eimer, who lives there, says she and her husband are "indie-film buffs," but that they had no idea when they bought the house that it once belonged to the Altmans.)
Unlike Spielberg, Lucas, Scorsese and the other great American directors who emerged in the 1970s, Altman was already middle-aged by the time he made his mark with "M*A*S*H." He had spent two decades making industrial films and toiling on TV series. Habits of efficiency became ingrained. And so, again like Keillor, Altman has stayed remarkably prolific. Not for him the icy perfectionism of a Stanley Kubrick, who would insist on scores of takes for the simplest scene. "I just do not understand that," Altman says in his flat Missouri drawl. "Never did. Didn't at the time. Still don't."
In this film, as in "Nashville," the actors do their own singing. Some are more suited to this than others. Streep, wearing a ruffly dress in her performance scenes, reveals a magnificent, powerful singing voice. Reilly and Harrelson, the cowboys, spend long hours one afternoon trying bravely to master four lines from the 1890s lament "She's More to Be Pitied Than Censured":
Don't scorn her with words fierce and bitter
Do not laugh at her shame and downfall
For a moment, just stop and consider
That a man was the cause of it all
Rich Dworsky, the bandleader on Keillor's radio show and in this film, assists the troubadours, picking out the melody on a piano for Reilly and placing his hand in the air at different levels to show Harrelson how the harmony goes up and down.
Stubborn progress is achieved. Reilly, who had a number in the film "Chicago," is no trained vocalist, but next to Harrelson -- literally next to him -- he is Mario Lanza.
That kid with the close-cropped hair, the one who served the pizza to Altman, is still sitting next to him. The two are deep in conversation.
An inquiry is made, and the kid turns out to be Paul Thomas Anderson, the fireballing young phenom of Hollywood who directed "Magnolia," "Boogie Nights" and "Punch-Drunk Love." (He is 35 but looks younger.)
He's not just stopping by to say hi. These days, for Altman, 80, to obtain financing for a film, he must designate a standby director who can complete the work if necessary. The director's chair where Anderson sits is imprinted with the words PINCH HITTER.
Further, he is the companion of Maya Rudolph, who will have their baby this fall and whose pregnancy has been written into the script.
The film crew seems a mite hinky about discussing Anderson's duties here. They prefer to speak of Anderson as Altman's pal (which he is), who is just kind of hanging out and lending a hand. But Altman doesn't mind broaching the subject squarely: "If I croaked or lost a day, Paul is here and he could take over and shoot any of this stuff at any time."
Keillor After Altman
There will surely be a soundtrack CD, but much else about the "PHC" movie is uncertain. It doesn't have a distributor yet, let alone an opening date. David Levy, a producer, says the picture might be shopped around at the Sundance Film Festival in January.
So the work of Levy and the other producers is really just beginning. Altman, too, must oversee the editing of the movie once shooting is completed. But most of Keillor's work is done. He's just enjoying the ride now.
Keillor probably isn't calling his agent and begging for more movie roles. Even on radio, he says, "I have less urge to perform than the average 10-year-old girl. I enjoy it, but it's not a big deep urge somehow." That's easy to believe when you realize that he never speaks his own name on the air. If he must be identified when playing himself in a radio sketch, that character is called "Carson Wyler."
"He wanted to call himself Carson Wyler in the movie," says his radio cohort Sue Scott, "and I guess Altman said, No, you gotta be Garrison Keillor."
When Altman and his caravan have finally opened their movie and meandered off to another subject, Keillor, who turns 63 next month, will steadfastly tend his radio show. After 30 years, he says, "A Prairie Home Companion" is still a work in progress.
"I think it's got life left in it," he says. "I keep feeling that it's ready to turn a corner and develop in some new way.
"I don't have a clear vision of this yet. But I don't feel that I've done the show that I really want to do. I think I'm still kind of searching for it."
